It is said that for any new party to gain prominence and achieve power, it must develop a mass base and capitalize on a confluence of factors despite massive civil dissatisfaction against the Left Front that ruled over West Bengal for more than three decades, it took Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress 13 years to gain power.
Chronic shortages of electricity and water, reliance on automobiles, severe air pollution, traffic congestion, urban sprawl, wretched quality of life in slums, rising graph in crimes against women nearly all of these are urban issues.
The AAP, which is still a party of, for and by Delhi, is therefore an urban party. Most urban movements tend to rely on media but Kejriwal's party even more so and it exists because of media, draws sustenance from it and knows how to manipulate the mass and new mediums to its best advantage.
The AAP chief's targeting of Modi isn't new and the strategy of trying to forcefully make himself into Modi's rival and therefore gain legitimacy as a contender for the Prime Minister's post, is also in danger of being overused. But with each such incident, the cult of Kejriwal gets a little more oxygen.
